Happy Monday! This week in the world of Cyber Events, we’ve got the InfoSec training event, SANS 2018, in Orlando, FL. It began on April 3rd, and is continuing until tomorrow, April 10th. This event offers over 45 cybersecurity training courses, and hopefully some of you were/are able to attend. The two-day courses begin today, and the courses are based on real-world threats and situations from experts with experience in the field. Also, I know it’s a week away, but I wanted to take this week to talk about an important event that is happening next week in San Francisco. It is the RSA Conference 2018, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA. It is taking place Monday, April 16-20, and there are going to be many exciting things going on over those few days. There will be many speakers, including professionals from Microsoft, Google, McAfee, VMware, Symantec, Cisco, and IBM. A few of the special topics and tracks being featured at this event include Intelligence, Application Security, Cloud Security and Virtualization, Cryptography, Hackers and Threats, Machine Learning, etc. This is an event you won’t want to miss.
On a different note, there is a major subject coming up right now in Cyber News. It is the fact that Intel is not planning to fix Spectre flaws in their older chips, only new ones. If you have not heard about the Spectre flaw, it is a security vulnerability that affects microprocessors that perform branch prediction. If you have a computer with one of Intel’s older microprocessors, you will not be receiving updates to fix the Spectre mega-flaw in that chip. One of the problems with this is that Intel is informing people by telling them what the affected processor families are. For example, Penryn, Yorkfield, and Wolfdale (2007). Do these names sound familiar to you? I didn’t think so. That is because these are not the product names they were sold under, they are just based on the chip’s architecture. It is going to take some deeper digging to find out whether or not your microprocessor is of the older ones. Intel basically said, that it is not worth the bother to patch a flaw affecting older chips used in a small number of computers, when there is so much more work needed to fix it for everyone else. If you have a PC which contains one of these old processors, you may want to ditch it and buy something newer for security’s sake.
That’s all I have for now! Feel free to send me any comments, questions, or suggestions you may have! Have a great week, everyone!